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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (Paperback)

Description

In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness-diagnosed only years later as epilepsy-marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun. Gripping, revelatory, and inspirational, The Spiral Staircase""is an extraordinary account of an astonishing spiritual journey.

About the Author

Karen Armstrong is the bestselling author of The Case for God, among other books. A powerful voice for ecumenical understanding, she was instrumental in creating, launching and propagating the Charter for Compassion, a global, multifaith cooperative effort to restore compassionate thinking and action to the center of religious, moral and political life.

“The story of the making of a writer. . . . It manages to dramatize the writer’s process of intellectual development and to find in it genuine interest, and, indeed, suspense. . . . As an account of the intellectual journey of an intelligent and unique individual, the book is often gripping.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Candid and compelling, and the sentences are flawless.” –The Dallas Morning News